have where they--"

He broke off to stir the fire.

"You like her?" I asked. The words sounded feeble. It is only the writer
who fits the language to the emotion; the living man more often selects
by contrast.

"She is my ideal woman," returned Dan; "true and strong and tender;
clear as crystal, pure as dawn. Like her!"

He knocked the ashes from his pipe. "We do not marry our ideals," he
went on. "We love with our hearts, not with our souls. The woman I shall
marry"--he sat gazing into the fire, a smile upon his face--"she will be
some sweet, clinging, childish woman, David Copperfield's Dora. Only
I am not Doady, who always seems to me to have been somewhat of a--He
reminds me of you, Paul, a little. Dickens was right; her helplessness,
as time went on, would have bored him more and more instead of appealing
to him."

"And the women," I suggested, "do they marry their ideals?"

He laughed. "Ask them."

"The difference between men and women," he continued, "is very slight;
we exaggerate it for purposes of art. What sort of man do you suppose he
is, Norah's ideal? Can't you imagine him?--But I can tell you the type
of man she will marry, ay, and love with all her heart."

He looked at me from under his strong brows drawn down, a twinkle in his
eye.

"A nice enough fellow--clever, perhaps, but someone--well, someone who
will want looking after, taking care of, managing; someone who will
appeal to the mother side of her--not her ideal man, but the man for
whom nature intended her."

"Perhaps with her help," I said, "he may in time become her ideal."

"There's a long road before him," growled Dan.

It was Norah herself who broke to me the news of Barbara's elopement with
Hal. I had seen neither of them since my return to London. Old Hasluck
a month or so before I had met in the City one day by chance, and he had
insisted on my lunching with him. I had found him greatly changed.
His buoyant self-assurance had deserted him; in its place a fretful
eagerness had become his motive force. At first he had talked
boastingly: Had I seen the _Post_ for last Monday, the _Court Circular_
for the week before? Had I read that Barbara had danced with the Crown
Prince, that the Count and Countess Huescar had been entertaining a
Grand Duke? What [duplicated line of text] I think of that! and such
like. Was not money master of the world? Ay, and the nobs should be made
to acknowledge it!

But as he had gulped down glass aft